Wide Open (16 page)

Hallie nodded. “I know. Hack said—”

“Shit, Hallie,” her father interrupted her. “Listen, would you?”

“What? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying what I’m saying!” He took a long drag from his beer.

Hallie waited.

“You know,” he finally said, “no one’d been in there for a while. There could have been oily rags or old blasting caps or a bit of paint or grease or, oh, hell anything. But that’s— There was this sound, right before I smelled smoke, a sharp crack.”

“Like an explosion?”

“Like—” Hallie couldn’t tell if he didn’t know how to describe it or he didn’t want to. “Like thunder.” He paused. “Only more … contained. Like if you bottled lightning, pared it down about seventy-five percent, then fired it off in a big arena. Like that would sound.”

Hallie didn’t know what to say. It couldn’t have been Pete—he couldn’t have done it in broad daylight, with her father in the equipment shed and the big door open. So, it didn’t make any sense, to ask if someone had started it, not even to her.

She asked anyway. “Do you think someone started it?”

He looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “Why would someone set that old shed on fire?”

“I don’t know,” Hallie said.
To warn me off,
she thought.

The phone rang. Hallie didn’t wait for her father to say anything, just got up and answered it.

“Hallie?” It was Pete Bolluyt.

“Shit, Pete. Why are you calling here?”

“I heard about the fire.” His voice was soft, like Hallie remembered it from eons ago, before the army and Afghanistan and Dell dying.

“Yeah, we’re fine.”

“I wanted…” Long pause and then, “This isn’t how I wanted things, Hallie. I just … things get out of hand.”

“Really, Pete? Things get out of hand? Is that what happened way back when you put two guys in the hospital, when you robbed a store in California, when your father died? When
Dell
died?”

She could hear him breathing. She knew he was still there.

“Yeah,” he finally said. “It really is too late, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Hallie said, “it is.”

She stared at the phone after Pete had hung up.
What the hell?
But it served to remind her of something she needed to do. She looked through the printed directory, but couldn’t find a listing for Vagts. She dialed Lorie’s number. No answer. She left a message: “Lorie, I’m looking for Jennie Vagts’s phone number. Have you got it? Call me. Or, if you see her, get her to call me. Thanks.”

When she walked back into the dining room, her father was nowhere in sight. She looked out the kitchen window. His truck was still there and the lights in the equipment shed were on; an easy man to find if she’d been inclined to find him.

Hallie turned out all the lights in the kitchen except the one over the stove and headed back to the office. Sarah Hale drifted along behind her, though she paused briefly in the dining room to stare at the pictures above the sideboard.

“Yeah,” Hallie said, “I don’t know what he was staring at either.” Every time she thought she had a handle on Boyd, he did or said something that made her think that, no, she really didn’t. Not unlike the ghosts, really, because every time she thought she had a handle on them, that some specific action—like Eddie and Dell staring at Dell’s coffin—meant something important, there would be something else, something like the way Eddie had stared at Boyd, for instance, that convinced her nothing they did meant anything at all.

Back in the office, Hallie fired up the computer again. Despite everything, she had made some progress today. Now, she had to figure out what it meant.

Sarah Hale disappeared six months ago—which Hallie already knew—maybe up near the Seven Mile, though someone, the newspaper article had said, supposedly saw her later at a mall in Rapid City.

According to news reports, she’d had a fight with her boyfriend and eventually they wrote her disappearance off as suicide, though they’d never recovered a body. The news articles all read pretty much the same: twenty-year-old Sarah Hale, missing since … No new information after about two months, though there had been a couple of follow-up articles, one of them the one Hallie’d seen in Dell’s office, marking the sixth month since she’d disappeared.

About five links down, Hallie found a website:
The REAL STORY about Sarah Hale
. It turned out to be one big long page of text written in a dark blue font on a lavender background. It appeared to have been written by her sister, Mina Hale, who claimed that she’d been with Sarah.

“I don’t remember exactly what happened,” Mina wrote fifteen paragraphs in, “but Sarah didn’t kill herself.”

Yeah,
Hallie thought,
that’s convincing.

“We were supposed to meet some people,” the sister wrote. “I’m not going to mention names because the police know and they weren’t there, but is that what people do who are going to commit suicide? Arrange to meet people for a picnic?”

Who the hell knows?
Hallie thought. Though she liked to think she did know, at least in Dell’s case, if no one else’s. She read on, started skimming when Mina wrote a dozen long paragraphs about Sarah in high school and auditioning for the band.

At the end, there was a question in bold and centered:

What Happened?

“I don’t know—okay? Seriously, I don’t know. I remember screaming. I remember red and pain and blood and— Someone took her. That’s what I’m saying. That’s the real story. She was bleeding. I remember that. But I don’t think—she wasn’t dead.”

Below that there was a section called “Notes,” which said, “Some of you have written to me and said, ‘You’re crazy.’ And, yeah, I’ve spent some time in a behavioral unit. But you want to know why? It’s because people DON’T BELIeVE ME!!! Everything that’s on this page is true. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

Well, shit.

Hallie stared at the computer. What was she supposed to do now?

She spent a few more minutes trying to track down Mina Hale, but there were at least thirty listings for
Hale
in Rapid City, and none of them were for
Mina
or
M
.

She shut down the computer and sat for several minutes with her head in her hands. She grabbed paper out of the printer and a pen out of the drawer and made a list:

— Dell dead on the Seven Mile

— Sarah Hale dead, disappeared on the Seven Mile—maybe. Probably.

— Ghosts

— Lightning bolts: Dell, Jennie Vagts, Pete Bolluyt, Uku-Weber

— Dell’s list: Colorado, Jasper, checking on turbine specs?

She paused, then added:

— Toolshed fire

— Flash of light in the atrium—from blood on the floor?

— Ghosts can’t enter building

— Uku-Weber

She underlined the name three times because it was the key, had to be the key; she just didn’t know how or why.

She fired up the computer again and did a second search on
Weber,
which found tons of information, Weber being a fairly common name. She searched on
Uku
—music, someone’s name, nothing interesting. Nothing useful. She did a second search on
Uku-Weber,
which turned up nothing except the company website, which she’d already seen.

Damnit.

Something had happened at Uku-Weber this morning. She’d seen it, even if no one else had. A bright flash, like lightning without thunder, without sound.

She stood and stretched. It was quiet in the house. All this sitting around was not only getting her nowhere, it was also eating up time. Dell had died a week ago. Hallie would be leaving in three and a half days. She went out to the kitchen, grabbed a jacket and a big flashlight, and was outside and halfway across the yard when she remembered her truck was still in Prairie City at Big Dog’s Auto.

Shit.

She changed direction and headed toward the big equipment shed. The night was clear and bright, as if the heavy clouds had scattered with the sun. It was cold, maybe close to freezing. She could smell dirty water and charred wood and the bitter stench of melted plastic, but they were already fading scents, the night breeze light and indirect. The big doors on the shed were open, light pouring out like it was lit up for New Year’s. She stood in the open doorway and watched her father, who was bent over the engine of an old Allis tractor from the fifties.

“Hey,” she said after a moment when he hadn’t noticed her.

He straightened, grabbed an old rag, and wiped his hands. “Yeah?” He stepped down off the short stepladder he’d been standing on.

“I need to go—somewhere,” she said, which was both vague and amazingly accurate, all things considered. “Can I borrow your truck?”

He waved a hand in the general direction of the shed door. “Keys are in it,” he said. “Gas it up, would you?”

It took her a minute to adjust the seat, which probably hadn’t been moved in the ten-year life of the vehicle. There was a thin coat of dust on the dashboard, a coil of rope, a half-full box of finishing nails, and a couple of bright yellow ear tags in the passenger seat. The tags and nails could have gone in the glove compartment, but Hallie knew without looking that the only items in there were the original owner’s manual and a pocket-sized spiral notebook with the date and mileage and the amount of gas for each fillup. She turned the key, backed around, and headed down the lane and onto the road.

Everyone talked about Uku-Weber and the future of weather, about weather research and control. Both Lorie and Tel Sigurdson had mentioned a demo site. What had Tel said, that they could bring rain? And that would include lightning, right? Lightning on the floor of the atrium. The sound her father had heard right before the toolshed caught on fire—like the crack of a lightning bolt. Lightning and phenomenal wind turbines. Maybe they had made a breakthrough.

But if they had, it was science. It was getting out ahead, right? What did Dell’s death or Sarah Hale’s ghost have to do with that? What did blood have to do with any of it? And why, if all that were true, had Dell been checking specs with an independent consultant over in Minnesota?

It took Hallie less than twenty minutes to reach the turn-off for the Bolluyt ranch. The moon wasn’t quite full, but the sky was clear and she could see the pale white of the wind turbines as she approached. No fence. No security guard, because who would steal a whole windmill?

She pulled off the road onto the grass and gravel access lane and sat in the truck, studying the site. There was a laminated sign at the edge of the field with a picture of the Uku-Weber building in winter, fall, and summer. In slanted white lettering underneath, it read:
UKU-WEBER WEATHER DEMONSTRATION
.

She got out of the truck, not at all certain what she expected to find. Dell’s and Sarah Hale’s ghosts drifted along behind her, cold at her back like a sharp breath of winter. The field held maybe three dozen windmills, the breeze turning the blades on several of them lazily, the sound a combination of a creak and a whirr. In the southeast corner was a shed with windows along one side, like the concrete bunker at a missile site. Directly opposite the shed, not quite halfway across the field, was a raised platform, looming black in the night. When she got closer, she could see that it held an apparatus that more or less resembled a cannon. Hallie crossed to it and hopped up onto the platform.

At the rear of the machine, she found a small access panel, padlocked, but the lock was so pathetic, Hallie had it open in less than two minutes. She turned her flashlight on, kept it pointed low, though Pete’s ranch house was a half mile away, up a long dirt lane with a creek and a rising swell of open land between. It looked like a typical power panel, though nothing was labeled: a lever on the left, a cramped keyboard, and a small LED display.

She flipped the lever, and the display lit up with a quiet thunk. She tapped the small keyboard, didn’t expect anything to happen, but the panel shifted with each letter, like it wasn’t fully seated. She ran her fingers around the edges, found a narrow gap, and pulled. The entire panel came loose in her hands. Underneath, a ribbon wire connected the display to a small twelve-volt battery. No other wires. Nothing to attach the display panel or the keyboard or even the power lever to.

Huh.

She replaced the panel and explored the rest of the machine carefully. On the rear of the machine was the housing for an engine, and there was an actual engine inside, but again, it didn’t connect to anything, like it was just there for show. Hallie kicked the housing back into place and stepped back. Dell drifted toward her and stopped. Sarah Hale’s ghost pushed at her from behind like the coldest winter breeze. Hallie took three steps forward along the base of the raised platform. Low on the side of the machine, something glinted in the flashlight beam. She angled the beam and bent forward for a closer look. Thinly etched were the symbols she’d seen earlier in the center of the Uku-Weber atrium—a hammer, an ax, and a sword laid one across the other.

Tel said he had seen this machine—this machine right in front of her—pull rain out of the sky. He’d seen it. But this machine did nothing. It was smoke and mirrors. Uku-Weber was smoke and mirrors.

Was that what Dell had known? Was that what got her killed?

She sat in the pickup in the dark for a long time, staring at the windmills and the machine on the platform, all of it looking spectacularly ghostly in the rising moonlight. She felt like she finally knew something.

She wished she understood what it was.

18

When she finally returned to the ranch, all the lights were out except the blue white glow of the big yard light. There was a hint of frost on the air as she crossed the yard. It was completely silent this time of night, the house dark, the only sounds a truck shifting gears on the highway and the wind rising in the east. It was the end of day six, day six of Hallie’s ten-day leave. More than half the time gone. And she still didn’t have the answers she wanted.